If you’re interested in the history of First Nations peoples, you’ll want to read this Globe and Mail article: When did the first people arrive in the Americas?

It takes only a few minutes for Daryl Fedje and Quentin Mackie to go back in time more than 50 centuries.

(Does the name Quentin Mackie ring a bell? He’s commented here a couple of times, and his blog, Northwest Coast Archaeology, is a favourite of mine.)

The two Canadian researchers have been investigating the theory of how and when the first people arrived in the Americas. Their recent work has confirmed the presence of human settlements on the northwest coast about 5,000 years earlier than previously believed. And they strongly suspect it goes back even further.

The pair scramble up through the old-growth forest in British Columbia’s remote Haida Gwaii islands where they have found evidence of ancient campsites. Below them lies a deep depression in the forest floor where a Haida longhouse once stood, perhaps 500 years ago.

But they are looking for something much, much older. Moving up the slope, they look at [continue]

If you want to read this article, you’d better get to it soon. The Globe and Mail tends to put everything behind a paywall after a week or so.